With sales of game consoles declining year over year, and console makers still predicting sales increases, analysts continue to predict that price cuts are coming soon.
"We remain troubled by the decline in sales of the three
major consoles," Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Michael Pachter wrote in a note to investors Monday morning.
Console makers "have made a strategic error by maintaining pricing for too long," he wrote. "The Wii remains at its November 2006 launch price of $249.99, and the core PS3 SKU has not seen a price cut since October 2007."
High console prices, Pachter says, are keeping consumers from buying more game software, and it will thus be difficult to sell games while the consoles are at their current high prices.
"Once we see console price cuts (expected in October), we think that software sales will continue to grow at a double-digit pace through at least mid-year 2010."
Interesting that Pachter lumps Wii in with PlayStation 3 in the high-price category. On the one hand, Wii is still selling at historic highs, even though the bubble has finally burst. On the other hand, $200 is a magic price point that could cause the frenzy to start right back up again.
Meanwhile, over on Dubious Quality, Bill Harris runs the numbers and figures out that, since PS3 sales have declined significantly in the U.S. versus the last fiscal year, for Sony to hit 30 percent growth year-on-year in the U.S. this fiscal year, they'd actually have to grow 68 percent over the next seven months. Meaning that if Sony does in fact go from 10 million to 13 million consoles, as they have projected, the U.S. may not end up pulling its weight in that equation.
The NPD Group's sales results for the month of June will be released on Thursday.
__Oh, and: __Harris points out the following quote from SCEA president Jack Tretton, as regards to the pricing of PlayStation 3.
That... what? I guess that while those two clauses, independent of one another, are true, stringing them together creates an untrue sentence, because "it" refers to a different thing in each instance: the high end launch model ($599/$499) and the low-end current model ($499/$399).
